Rending the Veil: Blackness as Dignity Constructed through the Works of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois

This dissertation explores the Negro Problem, as investigated by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, which has two distinct, yet connected, valences: the first problem is to uncover the Black self from the dehumanizing lens of enslavement and the second is recreating self-hood, the emergent idea of blackness, through the prism of racialized hatred, humiliation, and dehumanization. In this dissertation I apply hermeneutical philosophy and Black theology to compare and contrast the thought of Douglass and Du Bois concerning the theme of the dignity of Black lives and, subsequently, of all human persons. Yet I also contend, as a project in Black Theological Ethics, that the uncovering of the Black self and the creative conceptualizing of a Black epistemology hold radical possibilities for our moral conception of the human person. These possibilities center on the ethical duties owed to every person and to structures of liberation both within the self and within society.